Review of K-19: The Widowmaker

Like most people in the general public, I never knew the story of Soviet submarine K-19 and the part its crew played in possibly averting a nuclear war in the 1960s. As far as I knew, the closest we ever came to a nuclear conflict was the famous Bay of Pigs episode during the Kennedy presidency, and event that has been the subject of a number of dramatic portrayals from the recent 13 Days to the classic television drama The Missiles of October. Given this generally one-sided education of the cold war and the casting of America's most interesting action star, Harrison Ford, in the lead, it was easy to assume that this would be just another big budget actioner with some Russian accents. The trailers for K-19 certainly didn't do much to change that assumption, making the film look like something between the Communist version of Crimson Tide and The Hunt for Red October. So it was with these preconceived notions that I hunkered down into the theater chair, supplies at the ready for what I was sure would be yet another 138-minute endurance test.

The charitable among us would say that the film is "deliberately paced," which is a nice way of saying it's slow. Sometimes, slow is good in a film and it's used to great effect here. We are introduced to Captain Mikhail Polenin (Liam Neeson)  committed to his new boat, the nuclear submarine K-19 and his men. He is so committed that when a drill goes wrong and superiors demand a name to blame it on, he gives them his own. This act goes down well with the crew but badly for Polenin's career  he is stripped of command and made Executive Officer to the new Captain, Alexi Vostrikov (Harrison Ford). Vostrikov has orders to get K-19 out to sea and test fire a nuclear missile which will let the Americans know that the Soviet Union has the capability to strike back should Washington ever decide to use any of the nukes it has within range of Moscow. His superiors don't care how he does it, so long as it gets done.

Polenin does his best to serve his new commanding officer but soon discovers that their styles of command differ greatly, causing tension among the crew. Where Polenin saw his crew as a family with himself as the supportive, nurturing father, Vostrikov places himself in the role of harsh taskmaster immediately. Polenin and Vostrikov clash repeatedly making mutiny seem almost inevitable.

The boat has its share of problems before ever leaving the dock. A number of workers are injured or killed during its construction. The ship's doctor is run down by a truck just before the K-19 is due to leave port. Many of the circuits are sub-standard and not made to take the strain, causing shorts and fires in the system and the nuclear engineer is found drunk on duty. If this were a comedy, it would be McHale's Navy on a sub. As it is, it's just frightening to know that this could have been the spark that started Armageddon.

Very early on I began to wonder what director Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days & TV's acclaimed Homicide: Life on the Street) was trying to pull. It was becoming obvious that this wasn't an action film at all but an engrossing character drama. It would have been easy to stick with the character stereotypes that are established in the film's first 20 minutes but Bigelow and her actors manage to provide a number of unforeseen twists while all the time staying true to the characters. When everything that could possibly go wrong on the K-19 does go wrong, the events change the characters and the audience's perception of them. The actions of these men stand between what could be World War III and the continuation of life as we know it.

The film's climax is both emotionally satisfying and incredibly tense, leading to the only moments in the film where there is any hint of preaching against the ideals of the old Soviet Union. Even then, it's the same sort of disillusionment felt by many citizens of the former Soviet Union, not any newfound desire to rush to the West. I really expected to see the usual heavy handed Communism = bad portrayal played out but K-19 is very even handed in that department. These are men who are defending their country, their way of life in the same way any other soldier for any other country would.

Both Ford and Neeson deliver solid performances  this could be one of the best performances of Ford's career, despite the less than convincing accent. The supporting cast do their jobs well, again, despite some accents that are all over the map, including one that sounded more Brooklyn than Russian.

K-19: The Widowmaker is the sort of film that delivers food for thought with its entertainment. For a mainstream Hollywood film, that's a rare thing and worth seeing on the big screen before it's torpedoed by some flashy action-film-of-the-moment.